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Comment by alasdair_ | Hacker News Reader

> What useless shit are you going to buy with 'life changing' money exactly that a software developer's salary won't allow?

I still have the childish dream of wanting to change the world. Specifically, I want to be involved in certain kinds of political activism that will likely piss off a number of people, and I want to have enough money that I can support my family without needing to back off if my income source is threatened.

I’m lucky enough to be almost at that point due to startup equity.

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Yeah, I'm personally uninterested in spending money. But I could quite easily find things to do with money in the 10-100M range. First being starting companies without being beholden to investors that are monomaniacally focused on short-term cash extraction. Then investing in entrepreneurs who are up to good things in the world. And then supporting people who do useful things that don't pay well.

Unfortunately 10m - 100m can't do much in developing countries - from my experience.

But in developing and emerging economies you can make a huge impact.

Do you feel like you'll graduate to 'political problems are human problems and human problems boil down to idiots having children, idiots raising children and society being unwilling to rid itself of humans who have convincingly shown to be counter-productive to society', coupled with 'for society to function long term, it needs to have a shared goal, vision, not selfish goals of one house, two cars, fence, big tv and plenty of derp entertainment for each family'?

I feel like anything that isn't addressing these two issues is re-arranging chairs on the Titanic as it's headed for a crash.

Do you feel like you'll graduate to 'Political problems are not emergent individual problems, but an issue of rules. The rules of the political game are rigged to filter out competent people and only allow shallow ideologues to power'? ;)

This is an interesting counterpoint. On one hand, alexashka makes valid observations, but to what degree is the behavior (s)he is observing a result of high quality political leadership most anywhere on the planet? And if that could somehow be changed, might people's behavior suddenly change as well?

I think that dismissing large swaths of the population as “idiots” is overly simplistic.

There are many groups with power that benefit from keeping people misinformed and unable to rationally determine what is truly in their own self interest, all the way from childhood indoctrination on through to old age.

I’d want to neutralize some of the most egregious uses of such misinformation before simply blaming the people entirely themselves.

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